Ride the Lightning

Large Law Firms Seeing More Data Breaches

March 6, 2018

I know many readers have not read the 2017 ABA Legal Technology Survey because it costs money, but it is well worth reviewing the cybersecurity highlights – more 4000 respondents were surveyed.

22% of respondents said their firms had experienced a data breach at some point, up from 14 percent last year – that's a big escalation. Significantly, respondents at firms with 500 or more attorneys took the bulk of those hits.

Over one third of law firms with 10-99 attorneys reported being compromised in 2017 alone. Some of the key consequences from breaches were downtime, loss of billable hours, destruction or loss of files – and of course having to pay consulting fees for remediating damages from the attacks.

As one might expect, reporting stats are much lower. 7% of firms with 500+ attorneys and 3% of firms with 10-49 attorneys reported authorized access to sensitive client data.

25% of firms reported having no security policies, though all firms with 500+ lawyers did have such policies. 66% of BigLaw firms do have an Incident Response Plan. 51% of firms with 100-499 attorneys and 43% of firms with 50-99 attorneys also have an incident response plan.

Clearly, there is still much work to be done on the cybersecurity front!

Hat tip to Dave Ries.

E-mail: Phone: 703-359-0700
Digital Forensics/Information Security/Information Technology
https://www.senseient.com
https://twitter.com/sharonnelsonesq
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharondnelson
https://amazon.com/author/sharonnelson